This weekend, our family visited my in-laws in Sarpy County (south of Omaha). While we were there, I grabbed a couple hours of photography time during an evening and morning when the wind was nearly calm. In the evening, I poked around a little prairie planting in the yard. The next morning I walked a grassy cropfield edge.

From a distance, neither area looked like it had much going on. Very few flowers were in bloom, and there wasn’t much obvious insect activity. As always happens with prairies, though, there’s always much more than meets the eye – sometimes you just have to get down on your knees and look for it. I took some of my favorite photos from those couple hours and made them into a brief slideshow.

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About Chris Helzer

Chris Helzer is an ecologist and Eastern Nebraska Program Director for The Nature Conservancy. He supervises the management and restoration of approximately 4,000 acres of land in central and eastern Nebraska - primarily along the central Platte River.
Chris is also the author of "The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States", published by the University of Iowa Press.

On June 22 I took a photo of milkweed flowers over at a restores prairie near Cedar Rapids. I could identify the soldier beetles, Asian lady beetles and large milkweed bugs, but was hung up on the longhorned milkweed beetle. Thanks for the help.

Have you read the Donald Stokes comments in his Guide of Observing Insect Lives about the variety of insects on milkweeds that have red and black coloring? I carry that guide and the NWF field guide with me on trips to local parks.